Dead of Night (19 page)

Although it wasn’t even midday, it was getting dingier and colder by the minute. Rita looked up into the sky and said, ‘It
could snow.’

İkmen followed her gaze. ‘If that is the case,’ he said, ‘we all must work as hard as we can.’

Rubbing her hands together for warmth, Rita said, ‘I just hope the damn bullet is here.’

‘Surely it must be.’

‘Maybe. But if Grant T. Miller has any knowledge about what has been going on around his Beretta, and I suspect that he most
certainly does, then he’ll want that slug to disappear.’

‘But how would he do that?’ İkmen asked. ‘In spite of his bravado, he is an elderly man.’

Rita laughed. ‘Oh, don’t be too taken in by all that frail old man shit,’ she said. ‘He ain’t half as breakable as he’d have
the world believe. And anyway,’ her face fell and became grave, ‘Miller got friends even now, and believe me, Inspector, there
are some think he got them everywhere. People say the Black Legion is still alive and well, and that Miller is, as he has
always been, at the heart of it.’

It began to snow. Just a few small, wet flakes at first. But then it came on thicker and stronger. ‘We got to do what we can,’
Rita said as she put the hood of her padded jacket up. ‘This looks like it’s going to be a shitload.’

İkmen silently gave thanks to no one in particular for his thermal vest.

Grant T. Miller had phoned as soon as Officer Addison, old Weiss, one of the foreign cops and a whole load of others descended
upon the Johnson house first thing. Not that calling for help at this point was going to do him any good. No one would or
could come with all of them poking around outside. His call had been more an imparting of information – not that he thought
for a moment that other parties didn’t know what was going on. Other parties always did; that was their function.

Standing well back behind the drawing-room window, so that he couldn’t be seen, Miller watched a cop climb up the broken lamppost
outside the Johnson house and then shake his head. The bullet he’d fired at the foreigners wasn’t there. Old Weiss the doctor’s
son seemed to be in charge. Miller remembered when he’d gone to college to study medicine. Some Ivy League place, where for
some reason he’d become entranced by pathology and later ballistics. The study of death. Maybe the Johnson murder had piqued
his interest as it had everyone else’s in Brush Park. Then he’d worked for the cops, and continued to do so, even though,
Miller knew, he had to have enough cash put by to retire.

Elsewhere, in other more distant parts of Brush Park, streets were being renovated and revived. Project housing and niggers
with money mostly. But not for several blocks around his street. Miller smiled. He looked outside again and noticed that it
was snowing. Contented now, he left the drawing room and went to his kitchen to make himself some coffee.

The district of Sulukule was not what it had once been. When Ayşe had started her career, it had been a bustling, raffish
place where men sang in the streets and the gypsies ran houses in which scantily clad women would dance for money. Although
nominally Muslim, the gypsies generally went their own way, and so women might or might not cover their heads while the men
drank alcohol, or not, as they pleased. Secretive and insular, they had been resident in Sulukule for over five hundred years,
which made the current state of the district all the more melancholy.

In preparation, it was said, for İstanbul’s elevation to European City of Culture status in 2010, certain city slums had been
‘cleared’. Sulukule, with its unlicensed drinking and dancing houses, as well as its reputation for crime, which not everyone
agreed was actually deserved, had been an obvious target. Depending, like so much in the city of İstanbul, upon one’s political
and sometimes religious beliefs, opinions were divided as to why Sulukule in particular had been pegged for demolition. Those
of a generally republican, secular mind put it down as yet another example of the ruling AK Party, an organisation that proudly
owned its Islamic roots, trying to ‘socially engineer’ Turkey’s biggest city. Gypsies’ morals, they said, were not good enough
for AK. Those who supported AK, however, took the view that Sulukule was a slum that needed to be dealt with. Ayşe Farsakoğlu
was not sure where she stood on the issue. All she knew was that the district was now a sorry shadow of what it had once been.
When the bulldozers had moved in to demolish shacks where
sometimes families had lived for generations, the gypsies had left not just for the alternative housing the state had offered
them, but for places all over the city. Deprived of their usual ways of making money by entertaining, they were now a disparate
group, scattered around making money in any way they could, up to and including by begging. One of the few exceptions to this
was the famous gypsy artist Gonca and her family, who lived in Balat. Once mistress to Mehmet Süleyman, Gonca had been a hate
figure for Ayşe Farsakoğlu for a long time. In recent years, however, that had changed. As the result of a shooting in Balat,
Gonca had been wounded and had nearly died. After that, she and Süleyman, for reasons best known only to them, had parted.
Now Ayşe, if anything, felt only sympathy for the gypsies who had moved on as well as for the few that remained. In between
the many vacant lots that today characterised Sulukule, the odd shack, often covered only with a roof of clothing fabric,
provided scant shelter to the worn-out-looking people who continued to try to eke out a living there.

When Ali Kuban’s victim Fındık had been raped all those years ago, Sulukule had been a vibrant, exciting, music-filled district.
There had been so much going on that no one had noticed when the young girl went missing. These days, the overwhelming sound
of Sulukule was silence, particularly at night, which it was now.

Faint candlelight from the few shacks that remained on rough lots facing the great Byzantine city walls were all that illuminated
Ayşe’s progress. It was in the lee of this section of the wall, behind a stack of wooden planks, that Fındık had been raped
and brutalised all those years ago. Instinctively Ayşe put a hand inside her coat and felt for the pistol underneath her arm.
What she’d come to do, if anything, was unclear even to her. With the exception of one small shack that still clung like a
lover to a litter-infested pit at the bottom of the wall, there was nothing to investigate. But Ayşe couldn’t let go what
she’d seen on that Ali Kuban fan site. It was nearly midnight, and as far as she could tell, there were no other police officers
in the
area. So much for the Vice officers supposedly being on top of the situation!

That said, she had a very strong feeling, which she’d experienced ever since she’d entered the district, that she was being
followed. That was very likely. The gypsies, those that remained, were deeply suspicious of outsiders, and she knew that she
was very obviously out of place in the area. But it was still a shock when, just moments later, she turned around quickly
and found a huge man with a thick black beard standing right behind her.

‘Çetin’s staying in Detroit? Why?’

Süleyman told his cousin about Miller and the possibility that he had shot the young boy Aaron Spencer up in Brush Park.

‘But of course a big part of the reason why he was so keen to take Detroit PD up on their request for his assistance was because
of that old Melungeon man,’ he added. ‘Because of his own son’s death, I think that Çetin now feels he has to help all the
other bereaved fathers in the world.’

Süleyman had checked his suitcase in at City Airport and was waiting for the departures sign to light up and tell him when
his flight was boarding. Tayyar had come to see him off.

‘I’ll offer him a bed at my place,’ Tayyar said. ‘If he doesn’t know how long he’s going to be here, he can’t keep on staying
in that awful hotel.’

‘The Lakeland Plaza?’ Süleyman smiled. ‘It wasn’t so bad in the end,’ he said. ‘I heard of worse. Three British officers were
staying in some motel where rooms could be rented by the hour and there was an underwear vending machine in the lobby.’

‘Yes, Detroit has a few of those,’ Tayyar replied, unfazed. ‘Mehmet, did you tell Çetin about Elvis Goins’ elaborate funeral?’

‘No, I didn’t. I forgot.’

‘I don’t know if it means anything in the context of his death,’ Tayyar said. ‘I’ll tell him.’ He paused as they both looked
up at the
departures screen and saw that Süleyman’s flight still wasn’t ready for boarding. ‘You didn’t really like it here, did you?’

‘No.’ Süleyman smiled. ‘I think I’m an old-world person, Tayyar. I could never settle in a new country.’

‘The Melungeons had to.’

‘So they say, if you believe them,’ Süleyman said.

Tayyar grinned. ‘The most Ottoman of the Ottomans.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes!’ He laughed. ‘Why can’t they be Turks, even if they’re not?’

‘Well

‘The reason people come to America is so that they can reinvent themselves,’ Tayyar said. ‘They can start again. Even in poor
old Detroit.’

‘You have.’

‘Yes.’

Some members of Süleyman’s family had speculated for some years about why Tayyar had gone to live in America. He’d had a good
job in İstanbul, but when the Detroit post had come up, he hadn’t thought twice. A few rather more perceptive members of the
family had alluded gently to the fact that Tayyar had been less than pleased with the girl his parents had chosen for him
to marry. A rather unworldly creature, she had been horrified by the thought of living in a violent American city.

They sat in silence, Süleyman wishing he’d had just one last cigarette outside the airport when he could. Then suddenly the
notice that his flight was ready to board came up on the screen. He stood up. ‘I must go.’

Tayyar stood too, and embraced him. ‘It’s been good to see you,’ he said. ‘May Allah protect you.’

Süleyman picked up his hand luggage and began to walk towards security. Just before he got to the barrier, he turned and said,
‘Tayyar, look after Çetin for me, won’t you? Just check on him from time to time. He can get himself into some insane situations
sometimes.’

Tayyar Bekdil smiled. ‘Consider it done,’ he shouted back in English. ‘No problem at all.’

Samuel Goins put his coffee cup down on Martha Bell’s table and said, ‘Of course I’ll do what I can.’

‘With Diaz gone, we got no real big-hitter supporters in Detroit PD,’ Martha said. ‘Chief likes what we do, or so he says,
but he ain’t got the time to get real involved down here.’

‘Of course I have no influence over DPD,’ Sam said, ‘but I know a couple of people, including the Chief. You know I’ve always
been in your corner, Martha, and not just because you look after Zeke.’

Sick of trying to stay warm on such a bone-cold day, Ezekiel Goins had gone to bed long before his brother arrived.

‘How is he?’ Sam put a hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet. ‘Do you need any money?’

Martha smiled. ‘That’s a bit like saying does a fat man need to exercise,’ she said. Then she pushed his wallet back across
the table. ‘Nah. Zeke don’t cost me nothing. Keep it for your boys.’

Sam Goins, though divorced long before, had two sons currently studying at Ivy League universities.

He took two one-hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet and put them underneath one of Martha’s hands. ‘Well buy something
for Keisha,’ he said.

‘Nah, she—’

‘Little girls always need things,’ Sam said. Then he changed the subject. ‘Martha, how is my brother?’

She shrugged. ‘Agitated.’

‘The usual thing?’

‘Course. Not made no better by the appearance of those Turkish cops. Thinking like they can do something about Elvis!’

‘Yes, but they’ve gone now,’ Sam said.

‘One of ’em has.’

Sam looked shocked. ‘One?’

‘The older one, Inspector İkmen, he’s still here,’ Martha said as she tried and failed to give Sam back his money. She lit
a cigarette. ‘Called on the phone here this afternoon to say he’d be in town a while longer and would be over to see Zeke
again.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘No.’ Then she smiled. ‘But in a way, it ain’t no bad thing. The Turk lost a son hisself, and so it’s someone else, apart
from me, for Zeke to talk to about that.’

But Sam looked doubtful. ‘Provided his presence doesn’t embolden Zeke to go back to agitating Grant T. Miller again,’ he said.
‘We can all do without any more of that.’

‘As long as Zeke don’t get hurt or in trouble, it’s no problem to me,’ Martha said. ‘Miller’s a shit bag, always has been.’
She frowned. ‘Sam, I never asked you before, but do you think Miller killed Elvis all them years ago?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘When it happened, I was, I’m afraid, far too busy with my own life. When I look back now, I . . .’

‘The boy was wild,’ Martha said. ‘No one blames you, or even his father.’

‘I had to take advantage of the fact that Coleman Young was giving blacks and other ethnic minorities a say in the affairs
of the city! I had to seize that moment!’

‘I understand that, Sam. Everyone does.’

The 1970s, when Detroit got its first black mayor in the person of Coleman Young, had been a time of great fiscal hardship,
but for the minorities it had also been a period of opportunity. Non-whites had been able to take some control and actually
begin to affect law enforcement, public policy and wider political life. Sam Goins had been an early and very enthusiastic
supporter of Mayor Young. The fact that some of Young’s political dealings later became mired in controversy and allegations
of corruption in no way ever either involved Sam Goins or dented his admiration for Detroit’s first black mayor.

‘I just wish I’d been there for Zeke when it happened,’ Sam said. ‘You know, I was so caught up with myself, the first time
I saw Zeke after Elvis died was at the boy’s funeral. I think that one of the reasons Zeke went hobo for all those years was
because he felt that no one really cared.’